The manufacture of integrated circuit devices is a very complicated process. A manufacturer often needs the support of a number of subcontractors to successfully produce integrated circuit devices for its customers. FIG. 1 illustrates a common approach that many companies utilize in manufacturing integrated circuit devices. As shown in FIG. 1, the process starts when an integrated circuit manufacturer 100 receives a production order from a customer 102. Upon receiving the production order, it engages a number of subcontractors, such as semiconductor foundries 104, assembly and packaging subcontractors 106, testing subcontractors 108 and material suppliers 110 in manufacturing the integrated circuit devices to satisfy the customer's production order.
In the approach illustrated in FIG. 1, the semiconductor foundries 104 normally produce multiple semiconductor wafers at one time. A ‘lot’ usually contains a number of wafers ranging from 1 to 25. Each wafer may contain thousands of copies of an integrated circuit design. Each copy of such integrated circuit design is called a ‘die’ or a chip. The wafers are sent to assembly and packaging subcontractors 106 where each die is cut from a wafer and put into a package. Next, each package is tested by testing subcontractors 108 before it is sent to the customer. The material suppliers 110 provide raw materials or components to each of the subcontractors and to the manufacturer 100. All of the above tasks are performed in different subcontractor factories and these factories are sometimes located in different countries. It is the responsibility of the manufacturer to manage the simultaneous activities among all the subcontractors.
One of the challenges of the approach described in FIG. 1 is to allow customers to specify special manufacturing requirements of an integrated circuit design and to have the ability to track such customer special requirements throughout the manufacturing process. The ability to support customer special requirements permits a manufacturer to offer more services. For example, to achieve the best performance, many integrated circuit devices are designed to push the limits of the manufacturing process technology. Designers need to experiment with certain manufacturing process parameters in order to obtain the best results. Therefore, there is a need for a method and system that support customer special requirements and track such requirements throughout the manufacturing process while managing multiple subcontractors in remote locations effectively.
Another challenge of the approach described in FIG. 1 is that the activities occurring in all subcontractor factories need to be synchronized to ensure maximum utilization of production capacity. This problem is especially acute when ensuring that sufficient quantities of die are available to satisfy the special requirements of customers while at the same time minimizing unnecessary inventory buildup in the manufacturer's and subcontractors' warehouses.